Walking Backwards examines resistance to violence and repression through evocations of contemporary events and conversations with poets and artists whose voices arise from the Holocaust. Employing a remarkable variety of formal strategies— lyrics, parables, testimony, paratactic narratives and re-castings of Torah stories, inter-leavings with other texts—these poems offer a complex vantage on cultural erasure and persistence. Sharkey conjures a simultaneous present to reclaim a heritage expressed by gaps and silencing. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and the Yiddish language poets Abraham Sutzkever and Peretz Markish become contemporaries, as her words mingle with theirs to bear the weight of the unspoken. “What have we come for,” the poet asks, “to sleep where the dead slept in the bed of our absence?” What redemption she finds is in language.

Lee Sharkey is the author of Calendars of Fire (Tupelo, 2013), A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid, 2008), and eight earlier poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, FIELD, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Pleiades,and Seattle Review. She is the recipient of the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship in Literary Arts, the Shadowgraph Poetry Prize, and Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry, and she is a Senior Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal.